On the “51st state”

Winter, for practical purposes, has ended.

Trump’s bizarre second term keeps lighting up the blogosphere. Will or won’t he annex Greenland and Canada? Is he serious? Who knows? Does he know if he’s serious?

What’s eye-opening, to me, is how seriously Canadians regard this bluster. But then Canadians have long feared annexation in one guise or another. There’s quite a literature on this. I never knew!

This book by George Grant is a notable example.

I’m tempted, now, to re-read Charles Taylor’s philosophy in light of the imperialist threat.

This list of Canada’s “most important” books (part one; part two) also is worth consulting. (Grant’s book is #41.) We may as well read what Canadians have to say, before we conquer them.

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In the hullabaloo I’d forgotten that outstanding YouTube channel, Un mundo inmenso. Its latest video is about Bangladesh. Speak of a neglected nation! Did you know that one of every twenty people on Earth is Bangladeshi? That the country is cricket- and soccer-mad? That Argentina’s soccer team has more fans in Bangladesh than in Argentina? (Big deal, cosmologists would say: the size of the universe guarantees that Argentina’s fans are many times more numerous on other planets …)

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 83: Pride and prejudice

Karin wanted to sit through this BBC miniseries – one of her staples – while on (unpaid) maternity leave. So we did. It was my second viewing. I enjoyed it better this time, probably because we watched 50, not 150, minutes each night.

As you’d expect, the dialog is witty, and there’s lovely scenery, architecture, costuming, etc. But it’s the reaction shots that distinguish this production. Whenever some fool runs his or her mouth, Miss Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle) and Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy (Colin Firth) cast exquisitely disparaging looks: Lizzy’s, half-pained, half-amused; Darcy’s, woeful. (Firth, who is always turning to the wall, seems physically ill in two-thirds of his scenes.) Other superior persons – notably, old Mr Bennet (Benjamin Whitrow) and Miss Caroline Bingley (Anna Chancellor, a.k.a. “Duckface”) – are more overtly contemptuous. As for the fools that these higher beings must endure: Mrs Bennet (Alison Steadman) and Mr Collins (David Bamber) are too ridiculous for my taste, but Miss Lydia Bennet (Julia Sawalha) is superb; she isn’t stupid so much as lively, ignorant, and selfish. (I knew a girl at school who looked and acted like Lydia. She was amusing – and rather a dear – at arm’s length; her closer associates suffered. Happily, she did grow up.)

I needn’t rehash the plot of Pride and Prejudice. The themes are matchmaking and, especially, money.

“How long have you loved him?”

“Well, it’s been coming on so gradually, I hardly know. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

As for the actors, it might be useful to list some of their other notable performances.

(1) Julia Sawalha (Miss Lydia Bennet): A Midwinter’s Tale, reviewed by me. She’s just as lively in that movie. She has kept on getting parts, but I know of nothing comparable to her mid-nineties work. Her looks haven’t deserted her. Her youthfulness has.

(2) Susannah Harker (Miss Jane Bennet): Midsomer Murders, s12e02, “The Black Book.” The most intriguing murder suspect in that hilarious episode.

(3) Barbara Leigh Hunt (Lady Catherine de Bourgh). Strangled in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy.

(4) Adrian Lukis (Mr Wickham): Blair Toast, Stephen Toast’s insufferable military brother, in Toast of London.

(5) Emilia Fox (Miss Giorgiana Darcy), of the prolific Fox family. Kind-faced, handsome, unremarkable. Such actors are necessary. Typical work: the everlasting autopsy/⁠forensics drama, Silent Witness. Atypical work: Cashback, as a supermarket checkout girl. Most effective work: as one of the blondes in Roman Polanski’s Pianist.

(6) David Bamber (Mr Collins). He is in absolutely everything. My choice is his turn as a harried piano teacher/⁠road accident victim in the miniseries Collision.

(7) “Duckface” (Miss Caroline Bingley): Four Weddings, of course. Honorable mention: Ken Stott’s love interest in the lurid crime series The Vice.

The best tribute to this Pride and Prejudice is this YouTuber’s, who re-enacted it by himself.

I am reminded of Snoopy’s unabridged sock-puppet show of War and Peace, which goes on for days and is viewed, in its entirety, only by Linus.

Correction (29 Jan): Lucy. Give her her due!

Can you feel it

No school for Samuel: MLK Jr. Day, then two “snow days” (temps below zero °F). And he has a stomach bug. He’s lain on the sofa, except to puke. It’s been our day’s work to keep Daniel from harassing him.

During one glorious moment, Samuel ran to the toilet to puke, but Daniel was sitting there already, doing his business, so Samuel puked on Daniel. I was so proud of them both for going where they were supposed to go. We tossed Daniel into the shower.

Abel has done some puking, but that’s normal.

More about the weather. I’ve made a list of books about natural/​ecological disasters, for this coming reading year (it begins in May). One book per month. Some, I’ve already read portions of. The list also is inspired by the SoCal fires.

• Maclean, Young Men and Fire
• Stewart, Storm
• Egan, The Worst Hard Time
• Hughes, In Hazard
• Steinberg, Acts of God
• Krakauer, Into Thin Air
• Grunwald, The Swamp
• Stewart, Fire
• Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts
• Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
• Jacobsen, Nuclear War
• Weisman, The World Without Us

This is a manly list. The only woman on it is Jacobsen. Then again, these last couple of years I’ve read the “Little House” books, which feature fire, blizzards, locusts, and tornadoes; Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; and short disasterpieces by Didion.

One might complain that some of these disasters aren’t so “natural,” that humans are to blame for them. I agree. So would van Inwagen, who minimizes the distinction between natural and freely chosen evil. And so would various authors on the list (especially, I gather, Steinberg and Davis). But the point isn’t to allocate responsibility; it’s to imagine stuff and people getting burned up, or blown or washed away. There’s grandeur and pathos in these disasters. My former tutee at IUSB, an old Black woman, recalled how a tornado hit South Bend and she and the other children were dismissed from school to go die at home. They ran to their houses, into the wind. That’s like something out of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a colleague said, not a little incredulously, when I told him. Yes, exactly.

The cook, the QB, the babe, and their father

We ate dinner at church and everyone got to look at Baby Abel. They sent us home with two trays of lasagna.

Samuel was inspired. During our nap-time, he broke into the fridge and gathered ingredients.

“Today we are making goldenberry lasagna. Fresh and squeezy!”

My subconscious registered this and yanked me out of my slumber. Oh, no, you don’t.

This is what I found:

Ingredients: (a) goldenberries; (b) iced tea.

It could have been worse. It has been worse. Tonight we caught him trying to put something into the oven.

Absolutely not, I told him.

Absolutely yes, he said.

Watching cooking videos with a five-year-old isn’t a good idea.

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Right now, I’m watching Monday Night Football, with Eli and Peyton Manning and Bill Belichick. Daniel stands in his diaper in front of the TV and pretends to be the quarterback. He stamps his foot and calls out numbers. One! One! Two! Two! Three! Three!

A fire-pit

I’ve added Olympic National Park (Washington) to the previous entry’s list.

To see a map of the Olympic Rain Shadow, click here and scroll down. The rain shadow covers Victoria, British Columbia, a place that seemed curiously arid when I visited fifteen years ago; now I know why.

Speaking of Olympian mountains, I learned that Olympus Mons, on Mars, is about as large as Poland.

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We bought a portable fire-pit for burning the wood that accumulated in our yard these last two years, and for placing our lawn-chairs around, roasting wieners in, grilling cucumbers over, etc.

Samuel’s much-studied book, Cooking with Foil, would have been useful had he not torn out the pages.

Not that we’d’ve been guided by it anytime soon. We’re unable to keep a fire going longer than five minutes. Certain twigs and sections of rotten logs burn, and the rest just don’t.

Last night, Daniel wandered off with the poker, and we crept around in the dark, looking for it with our phone-flashlights. No luck. We searched again today and were about to give up when Karin lowered her eyes and noticed it in plain view.

Poker or no poker, we are hapless.

Karin tried stimulating the fire with her breath; she extinguished it. I told her she should never carry the Olympic torch. (Not that I’ve kept the fire going any better.)

Our lawn-chairs sank pretty far down into the mud.

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This aftertoon I watched forty-one-year-old Pepe, of the immortals, in the UEFA Champions League. He played well. He’s a thug, but I like him; as John Huston says in Chinatown, “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” I watched through a thicket of climbing, niggling children. Daniel begged to watch “hungry planets” on YouTube, and Samuel, who is susceptible to advertising, kept asking for Heineken.

Another one bites the dust; Daniel’s birthweek, pt. 2

Why haven’t I seen videos of the great Jenna Marbles in a long time?

Ah. (Wikipedia)

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For his birthday, we decided to encourage Daniel in his new interest: astronomy. We bought him a moon. Actually, it’s a spherical polyester dog toy.

It has a happy face and lots of craters. What more could you ask of a moon?

Daniel keeps saying it’s a fish.

Disasters

Sad news from Morocco: 2,900 killed by an earthquake. Sadder news from Libya: 11,300 killed by Storm Daniel. In Libya, dams broke, and there was considerable flooding.

Libyan watering projects have long been vexed. The country’s infrastructure is discussed in this two-year-old video by Un mundo inmenso:

There are no rivers in Libya, the video says. Well, it depends on what is meant by river. Libya’s Derna region has long been vulnerable to flooding, a fact which, to outsiders, might seem mysterious or paradoxical. It isn’t so to desert dwellers for whom the concept of a wadi is old hat.

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Pray for Samuel tonight. He may have eaten a few berries of toxic bittersweet nightshade. What I’m sure of is that he put some into his mouth and spit them out. (He insists they were delicious.)

He shows no ill effects, but their onset may be delayed as long as nineteen hours post-ingestion.

Samuel’s sticker chart; a cat video

Samuel recently went through the worst tantrum-throwing period of his life. It lasted longer than a month.

Thankfully, that behavior has been curbed due to a simple innovation of Karin’s: a sticker chart. For his privileges, Samuel must now do chores or quietly endure hardship – teeth-brushing, Bible-reading, etc.

We use stickers to tally his past successes and forthcoming rewards.

He loves it. Even if he ends up with fewer benefits than he used to receive, he seems glad to exert more control over what is due him. Previously, he depended on our irregular whims. He had to plead. Or scream. It made him anxious (us, too).

No doubt, some lesson about distributive morality can be gleaned from this. …

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But what, exactly, are these new efforts teaching him?

They aren’t teaching him about the intrinsic value of working or of managing his outbursts. His efforts are mere means to ends.

He might develop a liking for some of these respectable new behaviors. That would be nice!

But I doubt he’s learning to enjoy work as such. Few do. People might enjoy working hard at X, but that’s not the same as enjoying hard work as such.

(Even hardworking people tend not to work hard in every sphere. They prefer to delegate what they dislike to do, or fear to do, to specialists and grunts. Presented with courses of action that are likely to generate similar results, they choose the course that requires the least work for themselves.)

Samuel might be learning some self-control. He certainly talks about it more since he was told about the Fruit of the Spirit in Sunday School. He came out of class saying, “Sammy is self-control.”

Again, the benefit is limited. A person may or may not be self-controlled. But it doesn’t count as “Fruit of the Spirit” unless, you know, it actually comes from the Holy Spirit. I wouldn’t know how to engineer that.

Samuel’d have to give his life to Jesus. …

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Daniel, meantime, is still utterly wild. …

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Sometimes I’m alone

Sometimes I’m not

Sometimes I’m alone

Hello?

This video is our new family favorite.

An ode to Brighton

Hardly anyone read my latest movie review. I can only infer that the opus in question, Dalziel & Pascoe, series 1, episode 3, “An Autumn Shroud,” already is so well known that my commentary on it is superfluous.

Karin vomited many times today and stayed home from the office.

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One of the luckiest things for me this last year was that Brighton & Hove Albion F.C. employed three Ecuadorians, spurring me to watch most of Brighton’s games and affording me a view of what surely has been one of the most breathtaking teams in the history of sport: a team all the more remarkable for bossing games while languishing mid-table.

Brighton’s manager, Graham Potter, was poached by Chelsea several games into the campaign. But then his successor, Roberto De Zerbi, actually made Brighton better. (There is a YouTube cottage industry about this.) Chelsea ended up sacking Potter.

All game long – in game after game – the broadcasters would sing Brighton’s praises. But the roster isn’t deep enough to lift the club very high up the table. Mind, I say this after a game in which key starters were rested and their substitutes propelled Brighton to a 6–0 victory.

The roster, such as it is, might well be gutted before the next season, as the clubs with deep pockets come swooping down.

How about this season, then? There have been high hopes, but things look bleak. Brighton will play six of the final seven matches against the league’s top four and bottom two clubs. The top four will be tough because they’re good. The bottom two will be tough since they’ll be fighting to avoid relegation.

The good times might already be over.

I like seeing Moisés Caicedo and Pervis Estupiñán on the field together, featuring for a team that plays how Ecuadorians like to play. I don’t want them to be snatched up by bigger clubs next year. But that’ll probably happen. The most enjoyable club season of my life will have been a flash in the pan.

Ley lines; sax infusion; birds fly by flapping their wings

Enjoy.

Growth and limitation

Eleven-month-old Daniel, who’d been taking five or six steps at a time, casually walked across the living room two nights ago. He’s learned to climb up our staircases (but not down them). He’s grown tall enough for his head to be whacked by the refrigerator door. Today I caught him playing with the dials on our gas stove.

Samuel received his first YouTube lesson in adding and subtracting. He grinned and squealed and waved his arms. Fireworks of possibility exploded in my brain. Should I buy Samuel an abacus so that he can practice calculating like the Japanese? (Should I buy myself an abacus?) Should I teach Samuel about truth tables? Propositional logic? Quantification? He’d probably get a kick out of seeing “∀” and “∃.”

I’m not even sure I could teach logic to adults. I’ve never tried.

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I spent a couple of hours at the whiteboard with Samuel. He can’t add yet. He won’t even count all the dots unless I do so along with him. He does like to yell out the numbers and the operations, but he gets the sums wrong.

“Five plus three equals FOURTEEN!”

No, son.

He is bitterly disappointed. Not because he’s got the sum wrong – I doubt he understands what it is to get a sum wrong (and he never has minded factual correction as such) – but because he really wants the last term to be fourteen. He is an enthusiastic laissez-faire combinatorialist. If South Africa vs. Mexico is a valid possibility, and if there’s another possibility which is South Africa vs. Finland, and if South Africa vs. North Korea is possible … then surely five plus three equals fourteen is perfectly kosher, perfectly respectable (worth celebrating, even), no matter that dot-counting can establish that five plus three actually (therefore, possibly; therefore, necessarily) equals eight.

I believe this is his first brush with theoretical, as opposed to practical, impossibility. It is baffling to him.

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Philomena Cunk (Cunk on Earth) is coming to Netflix.

The best players, manager, referee, goal, and game of this World Cup

Check out my friend Andrew’s YouTube channel, “This Was a Movie”: “An ongoing series of overly-elaborate film essays focusing on peculiar films on the bizarre periphery of film history.”

The channel won’t just review horror movies, Andrew assures me.

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All rightie! This is my list. My First XI are italicized.

Goalkeepers: Bounou (Morocco), Livaković (Croatia), Szczęsny (Poland).

Left-sided defenders: Estupiñán (Ecuador), Théo Hernandez (France), Mazraoui (Morocco).

Right-sided defenders: Dumfries (Netherlands), Hakimi (Morocco), Molina (Argentina).

Central defenders: El Yemiq (Morocco), Gvardiol (Croatia), Otamendi (Argentina), Saïss (Morocco).

Defensive midfielders: Brozović (Croatia), Casemiro (Brazil), Kovačić (Croatia), Tchouaméni (France).

Attacking midfielders: Gapko (Netherlands), Griezmann (France).

“Mixed-use” midfielders: Amrabat (Morocco), Idrissa Gueye (Senegal), Leckie (Australia), Modrić (Croatia), Valverde (Uruguay).

Left-sided forwards: Mbappé (France), Perišić (Croatia).

Right-sided forwards: Álvarez (Argentina), Saka (England).

Central forwards: Giroud (France), Messi (Argentina).

Yes, I realize I’ve listed thirty players even though a roster is supposed to have just twenty-six. Feel free to draw four of the non-italicized players out of a hat and demote them to “alternate player” status.

Meanwhile, I’d like to add two more alternates: Aboubakar (central forward, Cameroon) and Méndez (defensive midfielder, Ecuador). They were flawless, except that they earned suspensions for accumulating yellow cards; Aboubakar accumulated two in the same match.

Not to be too patriotic, but I really don’t think that anyone apart from Hernandez and Mazraoui was a better left fullback than Estupiñán, even though he only played in three games and his third game was a letdown. (I chalk that performance up to a faulty tactical scheme.)

Besides, he was robbed of a goal.

Most valuable player: Messi.

Best-all-around player: Modrić.

Outstanding young player: Bellingham (England), with 19 years. One could make a case for Gvardiol, who is only 20 (almost 21).

Outstanding old player: Pepe (Portugal), with 39 years; he is of the immortals.

Best managers: Dalić (Croatia) and Regragui (Morocco).

Best referee: On the whole, I was most satisfied with Wilton Sampaio of Brazil. Szymon Marciniak, of Poland, will take charge of the final; he, too, is deserving.

Best goal: There were lots of excellent short-range goals in this tournament. Brazil seemed to specialize in them. But I suppose the best one was Argentina’s third goal against Croatia, scored by Álvarez and assisted by Messi.

Best game: Brazil vs. Croatia (quarterfinal).

Bonus award – best commentator: I watched on Telemundo/Peacock. My favorite commentator was the Uruguayan Sebastián “El Loco” Abreu.

Pre-tourney gripes

As if we needed more scandal, the rumor spread on Twitter that supporters of Qatar bribed several Ecuadorian players to lose the opening match. The rumorer, a British-based Bahraini journalist, has been identified and discredited.

Still, it irks.

Meanwhile, The Guardian takes pot shots, as it has been doing since Russia and Qatar rather than England and Australia were awarded the hosting rights for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. The paper now claims that this World Cup is a ruse for the host nation to be glorified through the Argentinian, Brazilian, and French players employed and rested by Paris Saint-Germain. (The club is owned by Qatari investors.) True or not, the criticism is silly. Is it really unfair that PSG should give Messi some days off before the tournament, when other clubs – and entire leagues – could protect their stars if they so chose?

Other criticisms of the host country, and of the social and political evils of global soccer, are more serious. Of these, some are better supported than others. The Guardian’s tally of deaths of foreign workers is especially contentious, yet it is cited without qualification by other mainstream publications, such as The Atlantic.

There is a lot of noise.

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I listened to an analysis by the Anglo-centric YouTube channel Tifo Football that got Ecuador’s tactics and personnel pretty wrong. I’m not saying we’re world-beaters or that we play the prettiest soccer, or even that we’re better than Qatar or Senegal or the Netherlands. But it’d be nice not to be slandered. When we lose possession, we don’t immediately stack our players behind the ball; on the contrary, we fight to quickly regain possession high up the field. And it’s Moisés Caicedo who attacks and Carlos Gruezo who drops back, not vice versa. Anyone who watches knows this. (This mistake would be less irritating if the analyst hadn’t just name-dropped Caicedo – a Premier Leaguer – as if he knew whom he was talking about.)

As regular readers know, this is the time when my thoughts and blogging are pretty well filled up by the World Cup.

Karin’s quiet birthday; a mermaid; return to Puffin Rock

Happy birthday to Karin: treasured wife, adored mother, possessor of immeasurable intrinsic value. Witty, dreamy, pretty, kind.

Somehow, Etsy knows that it’s Karin’s birthday and that I’m married to her.

Here, have some ads in your email.

Thanks, Etsy.

Curiously, a lot of the ads have to do with the Zodiac. But the ads don’t seem to know what Karin’s sign is. I don’t think she’s one for embroideries and wall hangings of Scorpio the scorpion.

It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate kitsch. She bought me this skeleton of a mermaid, for the Halloween season.

Tonight, we watched the final episode of Cat Hospital, and then Karin put on Puffin Rock for Samuel (and for the rest of us; we needed a change from Samuel’s YouTube videos). It’s been many months since Samuel watched this show, which used to be his favorite. He seems to have forgotten a lot of it. He resisted it at first, but now he’s deeply invested in the story. He supplies a running commentary.

Oona is so bad!

No, Sammy, Oona is good.

Oona is good. Mossy is so bad!

No, he’s just silly. And hungry.

Mossy is so silly!

Yes.

So, this bodes well. Lately, he’s been downright distressed when we’ve played his old shows or read his old books. He seems to have intense, nostalgic, none-too-happy reactions to things from his past.

But we need him to come to terms with the past, because soon it’ll be time for Daniel to be exposed to these shows and books.

Last night, I went out to buy milk; when I returned, Daniel had learned to raise himself into a sitting position. Since then, he has been practicing sitting up, and tipping himself over onto the floor. Thunk! His poor little head!

All in a day’s screen time

Samuel and Daniel have been watching domino-toppling and marble-racing videos, among others. After a couple months of escalating wildness, this is what my YouTube account has suggested we view:

“Hamster Escapes Pool Ball Traps for Pets in Real Life in Hamster Stories #2”:

Bizarrest cinema I’ve encountered in a while. Part rat maze, part funhouse, part video game, part fifties horror movie. Samuel loves it. Loves – present tense; as I type, the channel is streaming live.

The video goes on forever. This is what people do now, Karin says. This is how they spend their time: making and watching stuff like this.

I admire the video (I think?). Certainly, I admire the craftsmanship. I do feel sorry for the hamsters. I guess that in a perfect world, living, breathing creatures would be spared such an ordeal. But “sometimes you have to break a few eggs,” the makers of The Adventures of Milo and Otis must have told themselves every day they were filming. It’s more compelling that real hamsters are being filmed: just as it’s more compelling that, in Fitzcarraldo, the actors (well, the extras) really dragged the steamboat over a hill; that De Niro really gained weight for Raging Bull; etc., etc.

This video is what Karin & I put on after we watched the quiet, reflective Ruby in Paradise. Samuel begged for YouTube all through that movie. Now he is getting his wish.

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We spent half the day in Karin’s mom’s house because an exterminator was treating ours. We’ll go back to Karin’s mom’s house tomorrow. Scott, her husband, is getting baptized.

When we were driving home on SR 23, we passed a truck with two large, flowing, half-Union/half-Confederate flags. We must have gawked too hard. The driver gave us a dirty look. Half a city later, when we turned into our street, we saw him right behind us. He kept on going. He probably wasn’t deliberately following us, but I felt better when we got off the main road: his causes wouldn’t have been welcomed in our neighborhood.

Umbrella; vermin; children; Heineken

Rihanna: “ … under my um-bar-
ella, -ella, -ella,
eh, eh.”

Samuel: “Hahahahahahahahahaha.”

A timely song, what with all the drizzle. Summer appears to be winding down. We’ve had our first notable cooling, and leaves have been peppering the ground. This is a “false fall”; but tell that to the mice, who’ve again infiltrated our mud-room: we’ve found little mounds of dirt where they’ve been tunneling. We’ve left no food for them. They must simply be sheltering from the cold.

Daniel, who seems constitutionally squirmier than Samuel (and he is plenty squirmy), has been hurtling himself out of his chair and slithering over the ground, either backwards until he gets stuck or, like a hurricane, in a spiral pattern. He leaves little spiral-paths of puke. Or he stays in his chair and rocks his legs so vigorously that it lurches, a foot at a time, across the room.

Samuel leaves out uncapped dry-erase markers, and Daniel sucks them.

I’m gradually weaning the children off YouTube, to interest them in soccer (which will be necessary for them when the World Cup is played). It helps that on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, ViX broadcasts Champions League matches. Samuel is familiar with the halftime commercials. “Drink responsibly,” he says when he hears strains of Handel, who composed the Champions League refrain.

A consumer report

I’m testing the public library’s interlibrary loan service. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to order books through the website (and, usually, I’m pretty handy at that sort of thing).

No matter. The library is a six-minute walk from my house. I make the journey.

I disclose my desire to the clerk. He puts in the order. It takes two minutes. All hunky dory.

Three days later, I get an email. Your loan will be ready in 2 to 4 weeks (boldface in the original).

Two to four weeks! Now, I don’t like to be an ingrate, but that’s just not going to cut it, at least not on a consistent basis. In two to four weeks I could have an entirely different set of interests. Thank goodness this book isn’t for a research project; it’s just Pop. 1280, another of Jim Thompson’s lurid, cynical novels about wicked small-town officers of the law. Another novel I could take or leave (although, at this moment, I’m definitely itching to read it).

There are days I wish I still worked at IUSB, where, as often as not, a desired book would be on campus; alternatively, I could order it from Bloomington, Fort Wayne, Kokomo, or wherever and pick it up after four or five days.

Step out of academia, though, and I get banished to the outer darkness.

Daniel is old enough now that I give him board books and they entertain him for a good ten minutes. Samuel, alas, is not as interested in books as he used to be. He watches too much YouTube.

For nerds

The latest video from Un mundo inmenso takes us on a quick tour through utopian social theory, with mentions of Plato, More, Bellamy, and Nozick …

… as a prelude to discussion of a homegrown work, Arjirópolis or Argirópolis (1850) by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the author of Facundo.

Sarmiento wrote a lot of things. Even so, I’m a little shocked that I hadn’t heard of this book. I’m especially shocked that there’s no mention of it in the best English edition of Facundo.

I’m not shocked that Argirópolis wasn’t translated until recently, or that the translation’s price is $70. But there’s no fee attached to the Spanish original, in which Sarmiento uses utopian spelling (Arjentina, Uruguai, fewer accent marks, i rather than y, etc., etc.).

To call this book “utopian” is a bit misleading. A utopia is a no-place, or a no-place-in-particular, but the new country is precisely situated: it’s a confederation formed from Paraguay, Uruguay, and river-adjacent parts of Argentina, with a new capital on an island in the Río de la Plata. As in Facundo, the local geography determines the politics; the new land subscribes to no replicable political philosophy, though certain countries (e.g., the USA) serve as its models.

This is perhaps one of the more prescient “utopian” works, anticipating and even recommending the subservient role that Latin American countries would assume in global trade. Sarmiento is said to have been a Latin American apologist for neoliberalism well ahead of his time. To assess whether this is fair, I’d have to read the book.

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If the world had only twenty countries of roughly equal surface area, what would they be?, Un mundo inmenso asks in another recent video.

So: the channel has turned to counterfactual speculation. I hope it isn’t running out of things from actuality to discuss. This is an immense world, after all.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 53: Twister

I’m watching YouTube videos with Samuel. His request: “Some tornadoes in Nebraska.”

That’s my boy.

The best scene in The Wizard of Oz is the tornado scene. Same goes for Dr. T and the Women. That tornado scene turns into a birthing scene: Richard Gere falls out of the sky, wakes up in the desert, staggers into a peasant’s hut, and helps to deliver a child. My favorite, though, is the “tornadoes over Los Angeles” scene in The Day After Tomorrow.

Those movies have many things going for them, but that’s beside the point. As long as your special effects are adequate, your tornado movie will be awesome. That’s just a consequence of what it is to be a tornado.

You can make your tornadoes as realistic or as surrealistic as you like: tornadoes are ordinary and bizarre. You can have lousy actors. You can have a lousy story. You can have a tornado full of sharks. (No, I haven’t seen that movie.) The tornado itself will cover a multitude of sins.

Twister, mercifully, has lots and lots of scenes with tornadoes.

Its “human interest” story is pretty dumb. Roger Ebert describes it:

Melissa is not happy. One minute she’s engaged to handsome young Bill Harding, who has a promising career as a TV weatherman ahead of him. The next minute, she’s cowering in a pickup truck while tornadoes blow houses at her. And Bill can’t wait to find another tornado. “When you told me you wanted to chase tornadoes,” she tells him, “I thought that was a metaphor.” It is a metaphor, Melissa, but not for Bill’s dream. It’s a metaphor for Twister, a movie that chases tornadoes with such single-minded dedication that plot, character, dialogue and even your engagement all disappear into the Suck Zone – which is, we learn, that part of the tornado that sucks up everything in its path. By the end of the film, we have seen trees, TV towers, drive-in theaters, trucks, houses, barns and even cows sucked up by the Zone. Well, maybe only one cow. “I think it’s the same one, coming past again,” Bill tells Jo.

I feel sorry for Melissa (Jami Gertz), the only sane person in the movie. If I had to be married to Melissa or to Jo (Helen Hunt), I’d choose Melissa. Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) wants to choose Melissa but can’t. Jo’s got him sucked in, chasing after her dream, which is a death wish. (There are better death-wish movies from 1996: Maborosi; Normal Life.) When Jo was a little girl, she had to watch a tornado suck her dad out of a storm cellar. It screwed her up real good.

The domestic-strife-in-a-tornado theme would be detailed with infinitely greater sensitivity a year later, in an episode of King of the Hill.

Again, all of this is beside the point. This movie has tornadoes; and not in a coy way, the way Jaws has a shark but overwhelmingly consists of people waiting around for the shark. (Take Shelter might be the best tornado movie in that vein. If the people in Jaws are like, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” the guy in Take Shelter is like, “We’re gonna need a better storm cellar.”) The tornadoes in Twister are visible and plentiful, and they get better as the movie goes along. I confess, the first few tornadoes underwhelmed me, but the last two or three made the viewing worthwhile. Gene Siskel famously said: “I always ask myself, ‘Is the movie that I am watching as interesting as a documentary of the same actors having lunch together?’” In the case of Twister, a better question might be: Is this movie as interesting as a documentary about the same tornadoes? The answer is: Alas, probably not. All the YouTube videos in this entry are more interesting than Twister. But that doesn’t mean Twister isn’t awesome. It has a plethora of tornadoes. And it has lots of good location filming (in Oklahoma, mostly), and breathtaking skies.

P.S. I told Samuel the movie might be scary, so he stayed at the top of the stairs and listened but didn’t watch. He kept saying, “Oh my goodness! Oh my gracious!”

Highs and lows

I dragged out my old whiteboard and Karin bought some dry-erase markers. Oh, how delighted Samuel was: they were like a drug for him. The first day and a half, he didn’t color or draw so much as slam the board on our laps, no matter what we were preoccupied with, and insist that we draw things. “Happy triangle,” he would plead. “Happy nonagon. Happy decagon.” (YouTube has taught him shapes and some emotions.) Then, yesterday, for a few brief hours, he drew the shapes himself.

Then, this morning, he couldn’t draw anything. “The markers have dried out,” I had to tell him. Still he pressed them to the board. So intense was his desire to draw, the concept of their drying out eluded him longer than it would have eluded someone with a cooler intellect.